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You may have seen it around the internet already, but if you haven’t let me introduce you to Google’s latest web-driven piece of entertainment: Game of The Year 2018. In the quiz-based game, players are met with up to 20 questions (and a couple bonus rounds) about search trends throughout the year of 2018.
What was searched more: Laurel or Yanny? Which Rocket was searched more? Falcon Heavy or James Harden?
I’ll leave you to those answers and more if you head over and play the game. It is a ton of fun and beautiful to behold, honestly. I’ve played multiple times just to appreciate the subtle design, smooth animations, lack of any need to download or install anything, and complete disregard for device or screen size.
Sure, the quiz itself is fun and I’ve learned some fun trivia along the way, but I’m way more interested in what Google has done with this web app from a technical standpoint.
If you want to be even more impressed by how well this all works, add it as a shortcut in Chrome OS or add it to your home screen on your phone. For your Chromebook, make sure to right click the shortcut and choose “open as window” and now on any device you’ll be met with a windowed app that feels just as native as any app you’d download and install on your device.
As I said above, this web app doesn’t care even one bit what size your screen is. It seems almost infinitely adaptable and changes size with no issue whatsoever.
How Google is acheiveing this is likely tied to the same things that are making the powerful and useful web app Squoosh so buttery-smooth. It is development that is over my head and likely over most of yours, too, but the takeaway is the same either way: these newer web-driven technologies allow rich, interactive, smooth experiences to be delivered via the web. Frame rates and animations in the Game of the Year app are so fluid that it feels completely native and installed.
None of this requires a separate plugin, extension or install. This is all being rendered and served in Chrome and it is so encouraging to see. After all, I’ve shared my thoughts on web apps as the best possible end-game for app delivery, but up until recently, the experiences just weren’t good enough to see that eventuality.
Coming down the stretch in 2018, I’m more hopeful than ever that we might finally start seeing big, beautiful, fun, productive, and game-changing apps delivered via the web in a big way sooner than I’d ever thought possible. As it happens, Chromebooks are sitting at the ready to be the machines best equipped to live in that web-app-dominated future.
